POLICY BRIEFS

Overview

A policy brief is the shortest distance between a project's findings and a decision that has to be taken by someone who will not read the report. The briefs produced in NAIAD are concise summaries presenting new insights on the role of Nature Based Solutions in climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction, addressed to the people who set the conditions under which those solutions are implemented.

The briefs

The first policy brief presents an initial analysis of the potential barriers to Nature Based Solutions as a risk reduction strategy. It is the project's account of why measures that are widely agreed to be sensible are not adopted more often, separating the barriers that are technical, those that are economic, those that arise from the allocation of responsibility between public bodies, and those that arise from the way the benefits are distributed among the people affected.

The later briefs report what was done to address those barriers and what was learned in doing it. One is addressed specifically to the insurance sector, presenting the insights and recommendations on engaging insurers in the promotion of Nature Based Solutions and climate adaptation — the argument being that an industry that pays for losses has a direct interest in measures that reduce them, and that the obstacles to acting on that interest are contractual and regulatory rather than conceptual.

Another sets out what the project found about enabling implementation: the innovations in financing, in assessment and in governance that were needed to move from a demonstrated method to an intervention that could actually be built. Between them the briefs cover the whole trajectory from barrier to implementation, and they are written so that a reader can take a single recommendation and act on it without adopting the project's whole framework.

How they are used

The briefs were developed alongside the policy roundtables, in which the findings were put to the people responsible for policy in the sectors concerned and their responses were fed back into the recommendations. They are intended to be read by civil servants, regulators, insurers and elected officials, and they are deliberately short enough to be read in the time such a reader has.